America’s 10 Most Sleep-Deprived Jobs – Yahoo! Finance

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Thought this was an interesting read… at 10:17 pm when I SHOULD BE SLEEPING!

I just received a quirky little e-mail from Sleepy’s, the mattress chain, which hired researchers to analyze data from the National Health Interview Survey to determine which occupations, on average, produce workers who sleep the least and the most.

The jobs with the most sleep-deprived work forces are below, starting with the most sleep-deprived at the top:

Personally, I would love to know why economists are on this list. Economists in academia, at least, seem to have flexible schedules that should let them get lots of sleep. Maybe a lot of them are grad students scrambling to publish, publish, publish. Or maybe there are a lot of folks like Larry Summers who prefer allocating more hours for work.

Many of the other categories seem somewhat self-explanatory, given levels of stress or unpredictable hours.

Here’s the list of the most well-rested professions, with the occupation getting the most sleep at the top:

As you may notice, several of the occupations on this list involve working outside. Maybe more exposure to sunlight or exhausting physical labor helps (or requires) these workers to catch more Z’s. I couldn’t tell you why bartenders and engineers are on the list, though.

The lists are based on interviews with 27,157 adults as part of the annual National Health Interview Survey, conducted by a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sleepy’s says its rankings were based on two variables: 1) average hours of sleep that respondents said they got in a 24-hour period, and 2) respondents’ occupations, as they would be classified by the Department of Labor.